BOSTON — While listening to National Public Radio, I heard the voices of Palestinians and Israelis discussing the latest rounds of violence between their two embattled peoples.

I heard in their voices all the intractable certainties, the sense of victimization, and the fatalism that, in the end, nothing really good could be expected from the other, which I have heard ever since I lived in the Middle East 30 years ago.

I asked a friend back then, an American who had spent all his life in Jerusalem, how he thought this endless cycle of violence could ever end.

He could remember, as a boy, when the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. He had lived under the Union Jack during the British Mandate, the flag of the Hashemites when Jordan ruled the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, and then the Star of David.

That's encouraging, said I. "Ah, but then something horrible will happen," he said, "some outrage that will set it all back for another generation."

And so it has come to pass, whether it be the tragedy of lost opportunity at Oslo, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the well-timed suicide bombings, Israeli provocations on the Temple Mount and the second intifadah, and now Gaza II.

One might have thought that Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of all Jewish settlements from Gaza, and the removal of the Israeli army, would be the first real opportunity that the Palestinians have had to organize themselves in their own territory free of Israeli occupation. But the rocket attacks on Israeli territory did not end.

I thought when Israelis and Palestinians recently met in Jordan and promised to meet again that some progress would ensue. I thought there was promise in the Palestinians themselves trying to resolve their differences and move toward an acceptable form of recognition of Israel.

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But then, as if on cue, came the abduction of an Israeli soldier. As the Palestinians who abducted him surely knew, if you really want to really inflame Israeli public opinion you take prisoner one of their own. And so the "something horrible" happened.

No country can stand still and see its territory rocketed for long, and I have no doubt that if the Palestinians had left Israel alone and concentrated on rebuilding their shattered society, peace today would reign in Gaza. Israel's Abba Eban once famously said the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Yet there have been missed Israeli opportunities as well. Could Oslo have succeeded if Israel had eased its occupation to show the average Palestinian that life was improving? Instead, the number of checkpoints actually increased, making life for Palestinians even harder. Would it have been better to offer a more viable, connected Palestinian state as a goal, rather than a jigsaw puzzle with too many of the pieces missing?

Would it have been better, after withdrawing from Gaza, to lessen Israel's controlling grip on Gaza's borders so that Gazans didn't feel they were living in a South African-style Bantustan?

When Hamas won the election, would it have been better not to withhold tax money collected from the Palestinians in the hopes of bankrupting the democratically elected government? Would it have been more productive, in the long run, for Israel and the West to have cut the new Hamas government a little slack to see if actually running a country would make them more pragmatic?

And does it really benefit Israel to bomb a power plant in Gaza? Will plunging much of the territory into darkness and hardship go toward the release of its captured soldier? Or is it a form of collective punishment? If the idea is to bring down the Hamas-led government, there is nothing in the history of the conflict to suggest that force will succeed.

Attitudes have markedly shifted in the 30 years since I set up shop in Jerusalem. Most Israelis and Palestinians are now prepared to accept a two-state solution, and the Arab world is psychologically and politically ready to accept that as well. Israel is now in a formal peace with two of its 1967 adversaries, and it has no intention of resettling Gaza.

But the cycle of violence has not been broken, and the two peoples seemed helpless to end it. Hard-liners on both sides count on each other to keep the cycle going.

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2006, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe